Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Dopplereffekt, Drexciya, The Other People Place: New releases, reissues etc

Both the 2LP reissue of Drexciya's Grava 4 (2002) album and The Other People Place's 12", Sunday Night Live at the Laptop Cafe, on Clone Aqualung are both now available to order from the Clone shop and elsewhere.

According to Leisure System's Bandcamp page for Dopplereffekt's Cellular Automata album, 'Our initial run of copies have sold out on pre-order. A restock is in progress, however it means that delivery of LP orders made after March 28th may be delayed until May 29th, 2017. Vinyl purchases still include an instant download of the album on release date. Our apologies for the inconvenience!' They have some images of the album there now and you can play the album's title track. For everyone who ordered before 28th March, the release date is still April 7th. Also, if you go the the Leisure System Facebook page you will find 3 short videos of tracks from Dopplereffekt's Cellular Automata album and all the tracks from the album are available to play on the Bandcamp page now.

In celebration of the first Dopplereffekt LP in ten years, Rudolf Klorzeiger and To-Nhan delivered a special mix of records from their personal collection tonight on Red Bull Radio.

A new Arpanet live show has just announced for Berlin, Germany on 21st July. The venue, OHM, is located in the former battery room of a disused power plant.

“There was a long thought process behind this group, a lot of different concepts and principles. Before we even started putting stuff together we used to spend night after night talking about all kinds of deep concepts. That's where the energy comes from.” -James Stinson
I've made a scan of the Drexciya entry from the now very rare book, Techno: The Rough Guide by Tim Barr from 2000. You can see it (and much more) in the 2000 folder at this public GoogleDrive link. This is a great little reference book I bought back in the day, which even though it looks very populist, covers pretty much everyone you would expect, there's even a Dopplereffekt entry. They used the very revealing un-sourced quote above, and the entry must have been written before they returned with Neptune's Lair in 1999. It's interesting to note that even for just their UR period of 1992-1997, Drexciya were already held in very high regard.

This a new radio show by Bob Thompson from the UK station, Purple Radio, which looks at the order of Drexciya's Storm Series and even references my own theory about this from 2005. It's an enjoyable listen with some great music and interesting insights.

There are 3 Drexciya themed mixes by this German DJ and longtime Drexciya fan, MRJN, over at Hear This, well worth a listen.

VLR have a new Drexciya mix, Seven Storms - The Dimensional Waves Transmissions, up on their Soundcloud. Check out the rest of their Soundcloud account for other Gerald Donald and Drexciya themed mixes, quality stuff as always.

This is a new show from France's 'The Beat Radio Show', dedicated to James Stinson. I love their introduction and there are some great tracks selected. Back in November 2016 they did the same type of show for Gerald Donald. I think the name of the DJ of both shows is Stephan Bomba.

I shared a few videos recently on the DRL FB page that may have been influences on Drexciya or coincidently sound like them. Check out 'Frequency 7' by Visage, it's hard to believe this amazing track is from 1981 (there is even a vocal led version from 1979) and was just a B-side. This was a big tune in Detroit at the time and was championed on radio there by The Electrifying Mojo. I can certainly hear some elements of early Drexciya and the one-off projects, L.A.M. and Glass Domain. This track from 1982, by the French studio duo of Francis Rimbert and Frederick Roussea sounds kind of like a prototype Air maybe, their label, Record Makers, should reissue this one for sure, it's so close to some of Heinrich Mueller's signature sounds.